Animating virtual characters has become a critical task in the production of movies, television shows, computer games, and many other types of digital media. Performance-driven character animation enables users to create expressive results by performing the desired motion of the character with their face and/or body. In most performance driven systems, the continuous motion of the user is directly transferred to the virtual character. While this approach is suitable for some animation scenarios, continuous motion alone is not sufficient for all styles of animation. In particular, cutout character animation combines continuous transformation of visual elements with discrete replacements of artwork. Most existing systems do not support performance-based triggering of artwork replacements, and cannot directly support the creation of cutout character animations.